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Students Wonder If People Should Not Have Kids Due To Climate Change

In February, freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) openly pondered if people should be having children due to the coming cataclysm of climate change.

"There’s scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult," Ocasio-Cortez said last month. "And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, is it okay to still have children?"

She continued: "And I mean, not only just financially, because people are graduating with twenty, thirty, a hundred thousand dollars worth of student loan debt, and they can’t even afford to have kids in the house, but also just this basic moral question, what do we do? And even if you don’t have kids, there are still children here who are in the world, and we have a moral obligation to them, to leave a better world for them."

According to LifeNews, students at American University in Washington, D.C. were somewhat mixed in their responses on whether or not people should have kids.

Some students were asked if they were in favor of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal, prompting multiple responses. One student said they were in favor of the deal in theory but not in practicality. Another student said they supported it completely.

"Do you think we should stop having kids?" the reporter asked one flustered student. "I don't think people should stop having kids," the student replied.

Another said, "It's going to kill the planet faster and it's not healthy for them, but having one or two kids is perfectly safe and OK."

"Spreading your DNA is super selfish, especially because we have a huge overpopulation crisis," one male student said. "That contributes more and more to global warming."

Another student was so extreme on his population control prescriptions that he deemed China's one-child policy to be "reasonable."

Bill Nye "the science guy" has advocated for population control in the past to combat climate change. "What’s the one thing to do about climate change, if you want to think about the big picture? Raise the standard of living of girls and women," Nye said at a Planned Parenthood event. "When you raise the standard of living of girls and women, they have fewer kids."

While climate change enthusiasts like Bill Nye have promoted population control as a means to combat climate change, other enthusiasts have said that "solution" would do little to help the problem. From Vox:

The truth is that overpopulation in the United States is not even close to a serious problem. Even globally, overpopulation is an overstated problem.

It’s simplest to start with just the United States. How many people can the country support? Because I am an agricultural economist by profession, my bias is to first think about food. One simple question is how many people can the United States feed? Well, our net agricultural exports account for about 25 percent of the physical volume of agricultural production, which suggests that if we redirected those exports internally, the US could probably support approximately 25 percent more people. That’s assuming current technology and current diets and current land use.

In short, we could feed more than 400 million people, total, merely by consuming locally what we now export.